Category: History

In the upper foothills of western North Carolina where mounds begin to feel like mountains, remain the remnants of two lost cities. Both thriving and prosperous a century ago, their features are now unrecognizable as anything other rural landscapes. These forgotten towns locations, and what caused their demise, explain the absence of any community bigger than a crossroad in northern Caldwell County and why nothing—even a city– is permanent.

“I cannot imagine a better location for a little town than the one on which Mortimer is built,”–an admirer in 1905.

Today, the lost city of Mortimer is just north of rocky rapids through which Wilson’s Creek runs. Known locally as “The Gorge,” the creek serves as a natural waterpark for local folk. But in 1905, excitement in the area centered around the creation of a prominent town when the Ritter Lumber Company bought land with the intention of supplying furniture factories in Lenoir and Morganton with wood. Jim Mortimer, a superintendent for the company, brought along his brother Bill, who organized and promoted the town.

At its zenith, Mortimer claimed 800 residents, a movie theater, hotel, company store, and post office. Straightaway, the Carolina and Northwestern Railroad laid tracks to Mortimer. In fact, the train went even further north, to the small community of Edgemont, where most of the management chose to live, out of sight of the lumber yard. By the spring of 1916 Mortimer threatened to overtake Lenoir as Caldwell County’s largest town. So prestigious was new city that when former president Theodore Roosevelt came to western North Carolina, he stayed at Mortimer’s Laurel Inn, reportedly dancing in the hotel’s ballroom with Mrs. Bill Mortimer.

Twenty miles to the east, on less hilly ground, came another entrepreneur with similar goals.William J. Grandin took an early interest in not only the southern furniture industry but also transportation. He wanted to build a line that ran to Boone that would connect with the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad, a rail line carving out a path to Boone from Johnson City, Tennessee. Grandin’s Watauga & Yadkin Valley Railroad would be part of a significant time-saver for goods going across the mountains.

But when Grandin’s men came to the area and started buying land for the venture they were warned. One old-timer pointed to marks on the river banks to where the water had risen from earlier floods. “I can stop the water with the heel of my shoe,” sneered Grandin’s man. Construction commenced.

By May of 1913, daily passenger service from North Wilkesboro began along the line, including logs hauled down from the hills. It took the building of 20 trestles and a tunnel, but Grandin’s vision was becoming a reality. In its day, Grandin looked a lot like Mortimer, with elaborate machinery for planing lumber as well as other amenities. A post office, boarding house, and store that sold hats as well as women’s dresses gave the little metropolis sense of pride. The town also sported a blacksmith shop, baseball field, and an elaborate fire prevention system with fire hydrants strategically placed around the town.

Both the towns of Grandin and Mortimer proved to be money making ventures, growing rapidly in the effort to reach their potential and become established as permanent entities.

It took one event to bring them both down and stop their momentum: the Flood of 1916.

For 36 hours in mid-July, it rained constantly. In Mortimer, Wilson’s creek swept away 30 houses, while down river, the Catawba crested at 42 feet above normal.The Ritter Lumber Company, which had already weathered a mountain wildfire that summer, saw its lumber washed away. Similarly, the Yadkin River rose to levels never before seen or since. Trains on the Watauga & Yadkin Valley Railroad were stranded as all 20 trestles along the line disappeared in the torrential rains.

However, both communities vowed to rebuild.

For Grandin, the funding to rebuild its momentum to Boone became harder.Prior to the flood, his rails had extended only one mile north of Darby, still 15 miles south of Boone. The setback called for refinancing, made more difficult by the American entry into the First World War. The deathblow came with another, smaller flood in 1918, called a “freshet.” The plans for the railroad and the lumber mill were abandoned.

Mortimer tried to diversify. With Ritter Lumber having mined most of the wood from the area, local interests built a cotton mill. But the same watery fate that crushed Grandin also befell textiles, only later. It was the 1940 flood that upended the Mortimer Cotton Mill.

Since then, remnants of each town remain, but the land has morphed into something quite different. A visit to Mortimer gives few clues of its past glory. Actually, neighboring Edgemont reveals more about the glory days than does Mortimer. The old railroad depot is now privately owned. Coffey’s General Store hearkens back to the early days of the 20th century, serving the few local residents who remain as well as visitors. Down the road in Mortimer, the cotton mill ruins stand. More recent relics include a Civilian Conservation Corps camp from the New Deal era, a country store, and campground. Today, if anyone is there, chances are they are wading in Wilson’s Creek, either fly fishing in the cold or splashing around whitewater in the heat. Either way, their frame of mind is far from the city.

Grandin has a much different vibe. One of the mill buildings still stands, but today it’s a barn for a local farmer. The only other structure extant from back then is the boarding house.For years, the daughter of one of the original managers of the mill, Doris Hawkins, lived there. Her passing in the 1990s wiped from the ledger the last original resident of Grandin. The land is now privately owned, used mostly for farming. The fire hydrants are gone but some of the wood from earlier buildings was repurposed in 1925 for the relocation of Grandin Baptist Church to its present site. Walking what were once the streets of Grandin evokes a feeling far from the sights and sounds of a city.

Grandin and Mortimer, once full of economic bustle and promises of prosperity now lie lost, with only hints of their former stature. Seeing what was and what failed to come demonstrates to us that nothing is inevitable. People think of towns and cities as permanent and unfailing. They are not. Towns have come and gone from the maps of western North Carolina, some exiting spectacularly as Mortimer and Grandin, victims of catastrophic events, some dying the slow death of population decline as residents gave up and simply moved away. Under a landscape that belies their former existence, lost cities can still be found. A person only needs a good history book—and a wish to know–to do it.

I find myself at a standstill outside two swinging metal gates.Its calm, quiet, and cold. Its sunrise on a fall morning, and on the surface, the landscape looks eerie and uninhabited. However, looking around, my sense of wonderment and curiosity can’t help but take over. I fall deep into a feeling of serenity and lose myself in the sensations provided by the juxtaposition of decaying man-made history and the overpowering force of Mother Nature.

Before I know it, the landscape starts to speak. I start to hear the vehicles speeding up and down the road bisecting the property as they take a hard turn north and lay on the gas to make it up the hill. At the same time, I tune into a tractor firing up across the Henry Fork River as its engine echoes along the river bank. Then, the chord is completed by the howling sounds of chainsaws in the distance. The typically unpleasant sounds of the city become fresh to my ears as they play into the perfect man-made ambiance. Then suddenly, silence sweeps back over the entire landscape. Only for a second, the sounds go lifeless and time starts again.

I walk up to the metal gate blocking the road, unlock the royal blue coated lock and let the heavy-duty metal chain fall down against the metal gate. The metal on metal clang acts as a trigger, like a shot of espresso, or a Pavlovian response of sorts that signifies the start of a fresh day of hard work. I drive through the gates and lose myself to the mercy of the roaring sounds of the Henry Fork River and the voices of the Mill Hill, its people, its history, and its future.

This is my Henry River Mill Village experience. Mine is a unique one in that my family and I recently purchased the Village last October. However, it’s far from the most significant experience in the history of the Mill Hill.While we have been welcomed with open arms into the Henry River family over these last few months, we are humbled knowing that our ties to the Village are minute in comparison to Henry River’s vast historical impact on our culture and our community.

Our personal journey with Henry River is primarily focused on preservation and adaptive reuse.The Mill Hill was once bustling with activity, hard-work, and life. While the Village has more recently become known for possible paranormal activity, or better yet, as District 12 from the Hunger Games series, the real lives and their stories still reside within the walls of the remaining structures. Our goal is to bring those stories back to life and allow the public to enjoy the beauty, serenity, and history of their own Henry River journey.

The Henry River Manufacturing Company

While the area was known for its water-power as early as 1860, the most relevant historical impact came from the purchase and development of the land in the early 1900’s. The Aderholdt and Rudisill families partnered to establish the Henry River Manufacturing Company, which was a cotton yarn manufacturer that opened it’s doors in 1905. During its initial operation, the Company erected 35 worker houses, a two-story boarding house, a bridge, a brick company store, a power producing dam, and the original 3 story brick mill building where the yarn was produced. Until 1914, all operations were fully powered by water-power. This was later converted to steam power and electricity as technology advanced and upgrades were made to increase production.By 1963, the Company had tripled its initial production from 1905, but due to economic pressure from overseas, the textile industry had already begun a hard downward spiral.

In 1977, just after Wade R. Sheppard purchased the property, the main mill building burned to the ground after a believed lightning strike.At the time, this may have appeared to be a coup de grâce for the Mill Hill, but the community still prevailed. In fact, many former residents of the Village recollect the last native moving out of the Village in the late 90’s or early 2000’s. That’s sometimes difficult to comprehend, since the village still has no running water, and no sewer system. To put it in another perspective, while I was learning to use my graphing calculator in geometry class, people at Henry River were still using outhouses in the dead of winter. This is an example history that seems so distant, yet it can still be seen, touched and heard with our own eyes and ears as witnesses.

While the same stories can vary in detail from one Village resident to another, one theme seems to stay intact: community. Throughout the entire history of the Henry River Mill Village, there is story after story, example after example, of Village residents coming together in a time of need to help one another.Henry River was more than a group of workers that happened to live in the same neighborhood, raising their families, and minding their own business. Instead, Henry River became a large family, better yet, a Village network, that valued the

strengths they had as a community over the strengths they had as individuals.

It Takes A Village…

My family comes from a long history in the restaurant business. All of my earliest memories are surrounding food, and if my memory serves me right, I loved food so much growing up that my step-brother used to refer to me as the family garbage disposal. All joking aside, food is something that brings people all over the world together. It acts as its own universal language, and a meal prepared from the heart can express emotion, and can even take you back in time. That’s exactly what Anita Rudisill Brittain did when she offered to make her Black Walnut Pound Cake straight out of Henry River.

When Anita brought up the idea of making her Black Walnut Pound Cake, I didn’t realize that she intended to harvest her black walnuts directly from our trees at Henry River. As a city boy, this is something that seemed archaic, but I was fascinated by the idea of knowing how to harvest and use the large green and black fruits that always stood out more as ankle busters than as food.Of course, black walnuts are readily available at grocery stores, but this exercise was more than learning how to harvest and use an ingredient. Instead, it was a history lesson about community, culture and my favorite topic of all, food. With every crack of the hammer, Anita outlined the tedious step by step process of harvesting the meat from the black walnuts. With every crack of the hammer, Anita took us back in time to her childhood and to the way life was in the Village.We were riding in a modern day time machine.

Anita is a special part of the Henry River family, and she comes from a long line of Henry River natives.There is not a photograph, news article, or activity that goes on in Henry River without her being a part of it. History is more than acknowledging major events in time. Its also about taking the time to understand the lifestyle, emotions, and thoughts that helped sculpt the culture we have today. Since we’ve embarked on this project, Anita, as well as all of our other amazing volunteers, has been an indispensable asset and a wealth of information on what life was like growing up at Henry River.

Photography has been provided by Jon Eckard, Jeff Wilhelm, Kelsey Crowe and from historical archives.

Main roads won’t take you to Newton anymore. Interstates and bypasses, heralding a faster paced life, have long sidestepped one of the Foothills’ most picturesque towns. But a new study of Newton promises insights to a small town unseen when see driving by. Newton: Then and Now digs into the town’s appeal by seeing its past in its present.

For those of us unable to travel back in time, this new work combines seasoned experience with fresh eyes. Catawba Valley Community College photography students, under the direction of instructor Clayton Joe Young, combed through a myriad of historic photos provided by the Historical Association of Catawba County to select images that could be “re-photographed” from the same angle as originally shot, demonstrating the ways in which the city has changed. The results are striking.

From the dirt streets of early 20th century to the fads of the 1970s, Newton has weathered change gracefully. The results of the renewed look show a landscape adjusting to new challenges, new lifestyles, new priorities but never at the expense of its past. Side by side, the images offer a perspective reminiscent of a family album, where, in an instant, kids grow up before our very eyes. On a few occasions the two are blended as students endeavor to meld past and present into one scene, the traffic jam of 1952 placed on the street today.

To give another perspective on what it means to walk the streets of downtown Newton and know the surrounding events of the past, Newton: Then and Now includes commentary from the town’s most seasoned reporter. Sylvia Kidd Ray wrote her first article on what she saw as important about Newton (her kitty cat) at age 7 and over 70 years later, she still observes her beloved community in a weekly column in Newton’s Observer-News-Enterprise. Her family’s business in the news of Catawba County goes back to the 19th century. She recalls crossing the streets of the downtown area at age four, “they taught me,” she said, as she ventured down to the City Pharmacy for a “slumgullion,” the unique soda concoction only to be found in Newton.

Sylvia’s remembrances give voice to the images of Newton from past days, some from her own recollection, some passed down to her by earlier generations. When she went to get her groceries at Honey’s Supermarket, friends would teasingly ask if the street in front was the site of the 1865 shooting of a Confederate officer by a band of Union cavalry, many having heard Sylvia tell the story in public settings. “You know it is,” she always replies.

Every building has a story and Sylvia Kidd Ray has probably reported on them at one time or another. To say that the events that, at one time or another, occurred in Newton are unique is an understatement. One prominent family, Sylvia recalls, packed up their house in town when a member of the family got a federal government job in Washington, DC, only to return every Soldiers Reunion to open up the house on North Main Avenue, walk to the courthouse on The Square, and receive friends and acquaintances in the main courtroom. “They held court like the queen of England would do,” she says, still astonished.

Newton came into being as the county seat for the newly created county of Catawba, which seceded from Lincoln County in 1842. It is historically believed that the name came from state legislator Nathaniel Wilson’s new baby who was born about the time the General Assembly passed the bill creating the new county. That baby was Newton Wilson, named for an officer in the guerrilla warriors of the Southerners’ favorite Revolutionary War hero, Francis Marion, the legendary South Carolina Swamp Fox. By 1850, 84 residents lived there including the most prosperous man in Catawba County. By comparison, and at last count, over 13,000 call Newton home. In 1884, a cyclone ran through the town. The center of town has hosted several courthouse buildings, including the one built in 1924 that is now the home for the Historical Association of Catawba County. Republican presidential candidate Robert Taft gave a speech on the courthouse steps.

Newton has always been the patriotic Center of Catawba County, as evidenced every third Thursday in August for the past 128 years. Soldiers Reunion remains the oldest non-holiday patriotic parade in the United States. Internationally noted singers, national leaders and even a Cold War spy have all come from Newton.

The experiences of a town often fade with time as one generation fails to carry on the family history. Capturing those occasions, in visual and remembered moments, helps everyone who comes along later to see the community for its true value. A visit to Newton, a walk along The Square in downtown, maybe a stop at one of the restaurants or specialty shops downtown and a look at Newton: Then and Now instantly gives one a deeper feel for the character of a town that has much to convey, from its big events to small.

Newton: Then and Now will be available early next year from Redhawk Publications, a Catawba Valley Community College initiative, just in time for a visit when the weather turns warm again. Get a copy when visiting the History Museum, on The Square at the 1924 courthouse, in Newton, of course.

By Richard Eller
Photography provided by the Historical Association of Catawba County and Jake Mikeal.